Making Meat Snacks and Growing Distribution with Panache

Liam Dempsey: Welcome to Start Local, where we talk with business owners, leaders of nonprofits, and other members of our community focused on doing business in and around Chester County, Pennsylvania. Each episode will provide insight into the local business scene and tell you about opportunities to connect with and support businesses and nonprofits in your local area.

Joe Casabona: The Southern Chester County Chamber of Commerce promotes trade, commerce, industry, and sustainable economic development while supporting a diverse and growing marketplace. The chamber is proud to partner with the Start Local podcast to raise the profile of businesses and nonprofits throughout Chester County. Learn more about the chamber at scccc.com. That’s scccc.com. Hey.

Liam Dempsey: Hey. Welcome to Start Local. I’m Liam Dempsey, and I am back in the studio today with my wonderful co-host, Erik Gudmundson. Erik, how are you, bud?

Erik Gudmundson: I’m doing well, and I’m excited to be talking about more food here on this podcast.

Liam Dempsey: Yeah. We’ve lucked out here, folks. We have a string of food in recent episodes, so this is this is good. We’re excited for today. 

Today, we’re gonna be speaking with Brendan Cawley. Brendan is the CEO of Righteous Felon, a snack company with deep roots right here in Chester County in Downingtown, more specifically. Hello. Welcome, Brendan. How are you?

Brendan Cawley: I’m doing great, and I’m happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Erik Gudmundson: Brendan, it’s good to see you, and thank you for coming into the podcast studio.

Brendan Cawley: Absolutely. Excited to dive in with you guys.

Liam Dempsey: Yeah. Let’s get into it. So we’re gonna begin by giving our listeners some context. Righteous Felon makes meat snacks like jerky and biltong and meat sticks. Well, get into the kind of the specifics of that later. Let’s talk a little bit about your founding. It’s a story of middle school friends who took their pocket money hustle which really took the next level. Can you give us the Reader’s Digest version of your backstory, please?

Brendan Cawley: Absolutely. So, you know, like a lot of kids and even adults, I, at a young age, found beef jerky and really loved it. But always, it was kind of a treat for me because, as most of us know, jerky is a more expensive snack compared to other salty snacks like nuts or chips or pretzels, or things like that. 

But as a kid, always, you know, bought a stick of Wild Bill’s jerky when we were getting pizza at, like, the Italian village, you know, down in Downingtown. I was visiting family out in Pittsburgh. My the dad, my dad’s side of the family is from Pittsburgh, and my uncle out there worked at, I think it was Luke and Steele at the time. And we got to his house one day, took me downstairs, and he had this little mini jerky factory there with two or three dehydrators, two refrigerators full of raw meat and different marinades, and giant Tupperware. And it was kind of like, you know, an epiphany to me. 

And he taught me that this snack that I love could actually be made at home. And, he was making it at home, bagging it up in the Ziplocs with putting his sticker on it, his brand, and he’d take it to work and sell it each day there.

And this just kinda blew my mind. Just the idea that that, a you know, I didn’t know the word commercial at that time, but the idea that a commercial branded product could just be made at home and then taken and sold. 

And I think maybe it was one of the kind of the first signal of entrepreneurship or when, you know, entrepreneurship first clicked in my head, was probably that day. And he taught me, you know, how he made the jerky, things to look out for, kind of his process, key ingredients. And I kind of took that home that weekend. 

My parents were nice enough to either, you know, buy me a dehydrator for my birthday or, Christmas. I can’t remember exactly what it was. And I just started cooking up batches at home, and my best friends got into it, with me. We were cooking up jerky on the weekends. It was a very strange hobby for some for some 10 year olds, I think.

Erik Gudmundson: Very strange and would create some interesting aromas in the house, I bet, too.

Brendan Cawley: Oh, yeah. Big time. Well, my dog at the at the time was, not the same dog I have here next to me, but Murphy at the time was a huge fan of the makeshift jerky, factory in our house and the benefactor of some, a lot of product when we took our eyes off her, while I was cooking up. 

But, yeah, and then we started, we kinda followed suit. So, me and my two best friends, Tucker Reinhardt and Kyle Whitmore, we started bagging up jerky at my house and taking it into Downingtown Middle School and selling it, hand-to-hand transactions in the hallways and bathrooms to other friends in our grade. And it looked very similar to some other all-natural product distribution that was just starting around that time, in junior high. 

And a teacher saw us kinda doing one of these cash for baggy of product transaction, and pinched us and took us to the principal’s office, for what he thought was us selling weed. And we were, you know, able to quickly clear our names and the charges and then prove that it was just beef jerking a misunderstanding.

But to us, that misunderstanding was hilarious. And between the three of us, that inside joke just kinda stuck for years as we would make, you know, make jerky for snowboarding trips or music festivals as we got into high school and, you know, all that type of stuff. 

And we always just talked about it as this underground substance or this illicit contraband and had fun with it. And, you know, it just so happened that at that time, the brands that we really liked, like, you know, Wild Bill’s or Buffalo Bob’s, and, you know, Randy Savage was like the Slim Jim spokesperson kind of outlaw himself. But that sort of outlaw persona of the category at that time, I is really what influenced us to you know, between the misunderstanding of middle school. 

And then the, you know, the outlaw persona that Jerky has just as a category, Righteous Felon kinda came up as a joke or an oxymoron to kind of, as like a tongue in cheek reference to those other outlaw brands. It was never you know, we never had a significant business plan in our heads. It was more so just having fun creating jerky and then creating some packaging and some you know, if you’re familiar I’m sure we’ll get into some of the names of our products, but we try to have fun with, like, puns and and play on words or satires of some famous felons or famous characters or pop culture icons that maybe have a mischievous past or a mischievous undertone to them. And we just had a ton of fun with it,  and friends and family had fun with it as we got started back in 2012 or ’13. And, you know, it spread from there.

Erik Gudmundson: And over time, I’ve seen your products in more and more stores. I see in everything from Giant to Costco and, you know, starting with local bars and things like that, you know, many years ago. And it’s amazing to see how quickly you’ve  grown into a multimillion-dollar food company.

Brendan Cawley: Thank you.

Erik Gudmundson: Your products are natural. They’re locally sourced. You even have dog treats. So, tell us a little bit more about your product range and, you know, where are some specific local places where people can find your products today?

Brendan Cawley: Yeah. So we started out with three jerky flavors in February. Really, it was like December 2012 is our we landed our first wholesale county, which was the Whiskey Brooklyn up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where my brother was living at the time. 

So jerky was our first product line. Today, we have nine different flavors within that, you know, subcategory. In 2016 or so, we launched meat sticks, like better-for-you meat sticks. So kind of a healthy, clean, high protein, low sugar slim gin. 

And then in 2020, we launched biltong, which is a South African-style meat snack that has zero sugar, really high-density protein, no soy sauce, you know, gluten-free, soy-free. That one was, like, really popular during the keto craze, kind of in the, you know, late teen February and into early 2020s. 

And then I guess 2020, we also launched, it was a separate company at that time, called Wild Ranger Pet, which I’ve started with another local entrepreneur out in Westchester, Colin Phelan. And due to the chaos of COVID during that time, you know, we started planning the pro, that brand and project in 2019, launched early 2000, world turned upside down. Colin had his first kid. 

Within about a year, we realized, hey. This, we could make, this could make more sense if we folded it into the existing kind of righteous felon business entity. And Colin, who’s an expert at that time and more so today in ecommerce, joined us as our overall VP of ecommerce. And that’s worked out really well, particularly for all the dogs, with, you know, the employees and myself here.

But of that catalog, today, meat sticks are the biggest part of the catalog, and that’s really changed over the last two to three years. The market has really shifted more towards these better-for-you meat sticks. 

A lot of women have come into the category where jerky, historically, jerky was was really male-driven. That changed as more high-protein, low-sugar, you know, low-carb diets have come into popularity. And, you know, we like having that breadth of assortment across different formats of of meat snacks, but they all, you know, so we can appeal to different consumers or to help retailers fill in different parts of their assortment that they feel needs, beefed up for lack of a for lack of a better word.

Erik Gudmundson: No pun intended.

Brendan Cawley: No pun intended. No. Never any puns here at Rajasthan.

Liam Dempsey: It would be a crime if you used the pun.

Erik Gudmundson: Oh boy. It’s gonna be a long episode, Liam.

Liam Dempsey: Grab hold of your headphones. Brennan, let me ask you. Where can folks buy yours? Erik mentioned that he’s seen it in Costco and Giant. Where else are you available locally?

Brendan Cawley: Yeah. So, you know, just staying on the larger retailers. So, Giant Foods has been a great partner of ours. 

Costco, we launched in the Northeast, late 2023. We’re now nationwide at Costco. That’s their great partner and always have, you know, great prices on products. Wawa is another, carries two of our SKUs here throughout the Mid-Atlantic. So, they’re great partners that really kinda help get us into a lot of stores and be more available to you know, we like having better for you and healthier products more available to to more consumers, and those retailers really help with that.

But I think the coolest part about the company and what one of the things I’m most proud of is, like, how we’ve stayed true to the local partners that really helped launch us in the early days. And some of those locally here would be, like, Leoni’s Peeps in Downingtown. They have a huge display, and they have since the first day I ever walked in there and asked Travis if he would be willing to sell the brand there. You know, all the beer distributors around here, whether it’s Exton Beverage, you know, Lou Beverage, Beer mill, you know, almost all the beer distributors, bottle shops within Chester County. I think probably 80% of them carry right just fell on, and they have from the early days. Who else? Some local breweries. Man. 

Liam Dempsey: I see that. Really, that’s really amazing. That’s so cool that it started locally and grew from there. I wanna talk aboutt your products a little bit because they have really creative and fun names, and I’m gonna name just a few of them here. Teriyaki Balboa beef jerky, Al Capone,Turkey jerky, and Marilyn Monroe, Maryland Monroe beef jerky. And they all come with these wonderful, silly illustrations that are both consistent in their styling, but also correspond to the product name.

Liam Dempsey: Yep. So who comes up with the names, and who works up the illustrations?

Brendan Cawley: Great question. I think it’s the biggest differentiator of the brand in the area that we have the most fun with. You know, jerky no matter how good jerky is, there’s a lot of brands out there that make great jerky. 

But what we saw within the market, or what we thought was missing, was that sort of fun, playful naming convention that we were inspired by from the craft beer industry in the early days. And, so, yeah. We try to have a ton of fun with that.

I think, out of the, we’ve probably had 15 different jerky and sort of characters, we call them characters that we’ve made over the years. And I think probably 12 of those have come from the naming convention has come from Tucker and I. Tucker’s my best friend. He’s one of those guys in middle school. Now works he’s the cofounder of the company, lives out in Colorado, still very much, you know, kind of like creative partner, not just in this project, but we we spitball on a lot of different bits and things and we all we always have. 

But other folks on the team, you know, other friends, have, you know, submitted ideas that have landed. I think Victorious BIG was our, that was our collaboration with Victory Brewing Company. Another best friend, Jeff Walk, who works here as well, that was his brainchild back in the day. 

So we’ll really take the recommendations on naming from anyone. And if you know, it’s usually we’ll try a million things, and when one hits, like, it usually everyone kinda knows when it hits. There’s not a real science to it, but you kinda just know when it lands and it and it’s funny and it makes sense.

And, you know, sometimes that’s the, it’s the pun that inspires the flavor. Other times, it’s the ingredients that inspire the pun. And so, like, an example of that would be, teriyaki, we, you know, was really driven by we knew that teriyaki was a popular, very you know, one of the key flavor profiles within the category. It’s something we thought we needed in order to penetrate the convenience channel. You know, like a Wawa, and that’s the main place that that product is sold today. So that one was, like, spitballing for months on, like, what, you know, what could be funny? Teriyaki is such a tough word to rhyme or to pun.

Liam Dempsey: Sure is.

Brendan Cawley: And, you know, that was one of tux, where one day and it that one’s so funny because it doesn’t actually you know, the wording is so far off of, you know, the namesake, Rocky. But it works, we think, and it just kinda tricks your brain a little bit. And that little deception of the brain, I think, is what makes you chuckle or smile with it.

Liam Dempsey: Certainly combined with the illustration and the connection to Philly. Yeah. It’s a winner all around. It’s a comprehensive package.

Erik Gudmundson: Brandon, I remember you talking about how you initially part with some local breweries, to both distribute the product and also, you know, come up with some of the new ingredients and flavors and things like that. How did you draw inspiration from local breweries? And are there any particular local breweries that have always just been attractive to you from a brand or emulation or even mentoring standpoint?

Brendan Cawley: Absolutely. So I think we were super lucky growing up in Downingtown to kind of watch firsthand as Victory Brewery went from an idea into a full-fledged, you know, national powerhouse within craft beer. 

So I remember going there, like after local league games when I was a kid just, you know, drinking the root beer that they brewed there. So Victory has always been kind of a flagship, you know, the flagship craft brewery for Maine, probably got my friends and I into that scene earlier than maybe, very similar folks that just lived in a town that didn’t have a great brewer in it. Right? 

But what inspired us about, you know, craft beer and at that point in my life, craft beer was very synonymous with just victory was, you know, the flavor profiles were so much bolder and better ingredients and just compare completely different, like, truly differentiated from what everyone else thought beer was, which at that point was just macro light lagers across the US. Right? And it was almost like, what the like, when you would sip it, you know, and again, I was young at that point. You’d be like, this is, you know, so different from, like, the Ginling Lager my dad’s drinking or the Miller Lite, my we’re stealing from my neighbor. 

And that just was a profound thing. It was like, wow. This is beer. You know, that’s weird. I didn’t know beer could be this. But it was then, it was that coupled with the awesome branding, which is just, like, so different from Miller Lite and Budweiser. Right? It was like Hop Wallop and Hop Devil, and Storm King. And, hey, guess what? If you’re in the pub and you mix half of Storm King and half of Hop Devil, we call that a silverback. It opened up this whole, you know, this world that I just didn’t know existed within food.

And then, you know, on top of that, you layer in, like, how as I expanded outside of that, like, heady topper and, you know, sculpting my balance point and, Pliny the younger and Pliny the elder, these, like, larger than life tales of these hard to get things. Like, it almost was like trading cards, but it was beer. 

And that world, you know, I was very inspired and just love, you know, the world of craft beer and seeking out, like, hard-to-get things. And that always got the gear turning of like, well, if we did this with jerky, how would we kind of make jerky that desirable or that cool to be on a shelf? Like, it can’t just be a plastic bag of jerky, and it’s called like Brendan’s jerky or Westchester jerky company. That’s not gonna get anyone excited. 

So that’s where we, you know, our first three flavors we launched were OG Hickory, which was kind of inspired by Omar from The Wire. Habanero Escobar, which was, you know, inspired by Pablo Escobar, who by no means is a righteous guy. But in pop culture in America like, he’s kind of glorified in so many different movies and plots.

And I think at around the same time that we were starting this company, Entourage was, like, one of the most popular shows on HBO. And Vinny Chase’s main movie that they were always trying to make through every season was Escobar. And he was the main character. So, like, that was really top of mind at that time.

Liam Dempsey: Let’s talk about your production and distribution process. Do you run your own processing plants? How do you get all those delicious pieces of meat into nifty fancy packaging and out to so many locations? What’s that look like?

Brendan Cawley: Aaah.  How much time do you have?  No.

Liam Dempsey: How about three minutes. 

Brendan Cawley:  Yeah. It’s grown complex, as we’ve grown, but the model can actually be pretty simplified. We have manufacturing partners that own USDA-certified facilities with great, you know, food safety programs and USDA personnel on-site each day. 

And early on, I was lucky enough to find, today, it’s pretty easy to find, those folks if you have a good business plan, and you know, it’s contract manufacturing. But back then in 2011-12 when I was looking for them, there weren’t many. I was very lucky to find an awesome family out in Gettysburg, the Arndt family. They had a small garage at that point that somehow had USDA certification, and they were legally allowed to to smoke meats in there and sell them, you know, across the country. And Evan was, only probably 23 at that time, and he and I became friends and just started, you know, making jerky together there and selling it at those first few accounts that that we had talked about. You know, Whiskey Brooklyn and Victory and some of those other breweries that were early adopters. Leone’s, Waywood Beverage.

And essentially what we do is we come up with the flavors, the recipes here, or at my house at that time, or here at our warehouse today. We’ll scale it. We’ll take those, you know, from our dehydrator here into, you know, smaller production batches at these co-packers. We’ll launch that in our program that we call our R&D program, which is a pretty cool bag with a backwards R&D. And then we’ll release those as web only specials, like our, you know, essentially our jerky lab.And the ones that do the best with our consumers are the recipes they like the best, and we get the best feedback on is we’ll if there’s a business case there for it, we’ll launch that as a new flavor. 

And at this point, we actually have eight of those different co-packers around the country. We have three for meat sticks. We have two for beef jerky. We have one for Bill Tong, and we have one for pet treats. And then I guess the eighth is, you know, we’re working on a fourth for Styx because Styx has become such a huge part of our business. 

And the great part about this is, you know, we get to meet a lot of other great family businesses or, you know, families that have been running these great smokehouses or running great family farms. It’s another thing as we source Rosetta Farms, we’ve been sourcing from day one. 44 farms now in Texas, certified Piedmontese out of the Midwest. We use a lot for our factories in the Midwest.

nd it’s great for business because you have redundancy. Like if one factory has an issue or you know they have COVID, you know, that was something that, believe it or not, happened a lot where a whole plant would be wiped out for a week or two. You know, we’re not out of, you know, we’re not stopping production. We can shift production to another site. And they pack it up, you know, in a very food-safe facility that’s inspected regularly and certified. That product all gets cased and put into, you know, shelf-ready cases at those sites. It’s all shipped into our warehouse here on the Exton Downingtown border. And then we warehouse it all here, and we distribute to roughly 12,000, you know, 12,000 district, different distribution points around the county. As well as, you know, big e-commerce, on our own website and on Amazon. So all over the country.

Erik Gudmundson: That journey of going from, you know, your parents’ garage to what you just described is incredible to me. And I wanna focus on you personally, Brandon, here for a moment. You’re the CEO of Righteous Felon. And your work history, we didn’t touch on it yet, but it includes five years at Lockheed Martin, which, you know, is gonna be a very, very different experience I would expect than everything you did to grow Righteous Fellain to where it is today. So what did you do there, and how did that experience help you prepare yourself for everything you had to do to get Righteous Fellain off the ground?

Brendan Cawley: Great question. So, yeah, it’s at the time I was there, it was called Sikorsky Aircraft. I think LinkedIn switched it automatically to Lockheed when Lockheed bought them. But nevertheless, yeah, it was the aerospace industry, particularly the commercial helicopter cubs for Sikorsky, which was in Coatesville, PA. And believe it or not, I think that there, that job was so similar to what I’ve done here at Richestone. And I think that job actually enabled a lot of what we were able we’re we’ve been able to do here. 

And actually, my right-hand man at Sikorsky is our CFO and COO here today at Righteous Town, which is pretty cool. But what I did there I started as an intern. I graduated in ‘08, and I didn’t really understand what a recession was at the time. I was 21 or but I was lucky enough for them to invite me back after that during 2008. You know, an economic downturn.

And my job was essentially, I think it originally was just an estimator. And I thought that would be pretty straightforward and mostly based in Excel. But what it actually became, it grew into a much larger sort of, like proposal management, I would say, where my job was essentially each day to meet with key personnel and the department leads across engineering, supply chain, quality, operations, finance, and pull together all their inputs about costs, labor, schedule, you know, certification challenges for like new designs, and synthesize all of that into a proposal and a timeline and a price that I would then pitch to the GM of the whole site virtually every day. 

I had to pitch Doreeth who’s a rock star, but very, very tough. And I’d have to wait till six or seven at night until all her other meetings were done to pitch to her everything that I’ve pulled together about, you know, something she needs to sign up for between 50,000,000 and sometimes up to a billion-dollar program.

And she would ultimately be responsible for executing that. So she obviously looked at this very closely and was really tough on me and as well as Dave, the guy who now works here. He had the same role. But it taught us to really, you know, one, to get a great, a vast appreciation for all the different inputs that go into forming a business plan. 

Each one of these things was essentially a business plan, a project plan, a financial plan, and, you know, managing all those competing priorities between different groups, the competing personalities between different groups, and bring that into a concise thing that a GM or a, you know, the leader of the site could assess and digest and make a decision on in relatively quick time.

And that process of, like, taking things from down to the nuts and bolts all the way up to, like, high-level, hey. Can you sign up for this 50,000,000, you know, $50,000,000 aircraft in ten minutes? Our pitch had to our pitch and our proposal to her had to be very, very tight, for her to be able to approve it or not approve it or to tell us exactly what questions she needs more clarification on. 

And that was immediately transferable, I think, to a start-up business where it’s like, look. I gotta talk to the USDA. I gotta talk to the FDA. I need to find a packaging supplier. I need an artist. I need, I need to find a beef supplier. And somehow I need to make this. I need equipment. I need to get licensing. You know, you’re pulling together so many different things. 

And the ability to have a framework on how to puzzle piece those altogether was a direct, you know, was a direct outcome of the challenges I faced early on, and the mentorship that I got at Sikorsky, from Doreeth, from Chris Pete, from Jason Andros, you know, some really great people there that I owe a lot to just for, like, challenging me and taking the time to teach me a lot of things that they didn’t have to take the time to teach me. So I’m very appreciative of all the different mentors and sort of coaches I’ve had through the years.

Liam Dempsey: Thanks for walking us through that. That’s really interesting, the way the helicopter industry enabled you to dive deep and become quite successful in the meat snack industry. Yeah. How about the meat snack industry? Can we call it that?

Brendan Cawley: Absolutely. We can call it whatever you guys like, but that is what it’s called.

Liam Dempsey: Appreciate your flexibility. 

So you shared earlier that this, the whole Righteous Felon story is an outgrowth of really a side hustle of a few middle school kids. And clearly, you’re well beyond that. Right? So let’s talk about Righteous Felon as a company, as an employer. What roles and departments do you have within your company, and how big are you? How many people work for Righteous Felon?

Brendan Cawley: So today, we have 20 folks including myself on the commercial, like, commercial team. So that’s either our sales team, marketing team, or supply chain here within the warehouse. Like, our salary guys who are doing a lot of the logistics, coordination across all these sites, you know, we consider them part of the commercial team. 

Then on top of that, we have about five full-time warehouse folks and then another fifth you know, 10 to 15, depending on the season, part time warehouse, pack, you know, pack labor. Netflix is up a lot during holidays and, like, Father’s Day because we have a huge gifting component to our business. 

And almost everyone is either friend of mine from a young age, or started here as interns when they were at Westchester University, and then we brought them out full time and or they started here as an intern, and then their brother or their cousin or their boyfriend, you know, needed a job and they started here. And pretty proud that, you know, it’s very unorthodox how we hire. Like, we’ve almost we’ve only I was, like, 70 people that have probably worked here through the years at part timer. Maybe not 70, maybe 50, but only one has ever been through, like, actually, no. We’ve never hired anyone from, like, a job posting. It’s always been a friend of a friend or connection or referral. And, it’s not orthodox, but it’s worked for us. 

And we got a really great tight knit team here that hangs out a lot outside of work. I think COVID really brought a lot of the team together. This was, like, the only group we were kind of allowed to hang out with. And, you know, also, all of our salary team is is, you know, has some equity in the company as well.

We have it’s an employee owned company, which I think goes a long way, as far as just like I don’t think I have to worry about a lot of the things that other small business employers have to worry about. I’m just like people slacking or do they have the best interest of the company in mind. 

The ownership and the accountability, I think, really help take care of that, and everyone here is, like, laser-focused on just being great teammates and achieving a team local. And that’s worked really well for us. And I know a lot of…

Erik Gudmundson: The culture seems to come through in the sense that, you know, your branding is always very consistent, you know, all the way down to the illustration. Like, is it the same person that does the illustrations on all your packaging, all the way through? Because it really is clear what you’re about. You have established a brand, undoubtedly.

Brendan Cawley: Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. So we have a great another great Downingtown guy. Dan Homa did our original artwork. And from that time, he’s done some other things for us, but we have another artist now that that kind of does the decoration on that on the bull, like, however however that, you know, whatever new garb we’re gonna put on this new flavor. 

We also use an offshore, a girl from Italy who does more of our stick packaging artwork, and we’re thrilled with what she does. But just like we keep all the same employees here, we have almost all the same suppliers from day one. Like, we’ve really proud about the relationships we’ve been able to build and maintain, particularly through difficult times like COVID, you know, there’s a lot of the ability to, like, stick with people and then to stick with us through the ebbs and flows of a twelve year old business now and always, you know, have each other’s backs and grow together and get through challenges together. That is I think is another cool thing that I’m proud of about the company.

Erik Gudmundson: Well, another thing you shared is a membership in the conservation alliance. So there’s a cause as well. And the conservation alliance, it’s a membership group of businesses which share a percentage of their respective profits with the alliance and then direct organizations and programs in North America that protect outdoor and wild spaces. So, why did you select that particular cause of all the causes that are out there, and why is it important to you and your organization?

Brendan Cawley: Well, I think, one, I love the national parks. My dad and I try to hit a national park, once a year together. So it’s key to me. I think it’s one of the great programs that The US has. And anytime you go to one, I think it’s one of the few places anymore that you can truly be just awestruck and jaw-dropping from nature, and that has a very I think, more of us could use that. I think it would solve more, solve a lot of problems here. 

Two is jerky has always been kinda synonymous with the outdoors. And so for us, you know, I think it there’s alignment there. 

So for those two reasons, that’s, you know, where the conservation alliance comes, you know, comes into play is I think it’s a great program that needs fine, you know, financial support, and it’s something we should look to expand versus retract. 

I wouldn’t say it’s not really a flagship. Liam, you and I talked about this once. Like, we do some charitable things like that and with some other organizations. We don’t try to make it the forefront of the brand. I think that that’s a trend that so other folks do and and it has its place, but I think small business is hard enough on its own creating a value proposition based on product and, you know, nutrition and building a good team and a a community, amongst the, you know, the work team and the vendors and customers. \

And, you know, I personally just haven’t been able to ever find the space to to make I don’t want people to buy our product because they think we support those conservational lives. I would like them to buy our product because it’s great. It brings them value. They find it fun. They like sharing it with their, you know, family and friends. 

And if the conservation alliance is a feather in the cap, then so be it. That’s really just something we do because we think it’s the right thing to do for for businesses to that to financially support causes that they think are, you know, worthwhile.

Liam Dempsey: Brendan, you shared that you run some of your R&D through your online website sales. All of your products or the bulk of products are available online through your site, which is Shopify, which is a web designer, web market. I love to see what people are using.

Brendan Cawley: Yep.

Liam Dempsey: Can you share with with us what kind of percentage of sales are coming directly through your website, direct to consumers? How much of a valuable tool is that for your for your business?

Brendan Cawley: Yeah. It’s a super valuable tool. I can tell you right now.

Liam Dempsey: For those that can’t see, he’s flipping through what appears to be a printout of financial reports.

Brendan Cawley: Yeah. So yeah. So direct to consumer last year for us, which is our Shopify site, was 12% of sales. You know, that probably doesn’t you know, we did last year was about 4 and a half $5,000,000 just through our website. And more than half of that comes in Father’s Day and December from Black Friday through the end of the year. So if you can imagine, those months are absolutely insane here at the warehouse, and that’s really where we staff up. 

But Shopify, I think I was probably one of the first, I don’t know, thousand or 10,000 people on that store I got on in 2012. I couldn’t be a bigger proponent of this platform. It’s so critical to what we do. We use it for our wholesale business as well, which is rtznbrands.com. And we have, you know, Monica, who’s our first employee, our first intern. She’s a an absolute, you know, pro across the Shopify platform now. And so we think of that as, like, a real competitive advantage is, one, how capable that software is. 

And then, two, when you have someone that really knows how to command it, there’s no you can solve almost any sort of ordering or product management issue, just, you know, with that combination of skill and then just the capability of the platform.

Erik Gudmundson: Going back to your product names, which is fun to go on your website and kinda look at all the product names because some of them I haven’t seen in stores necessarily, at least not the same store. You’re pulling names from people with checkered pasts, in the sense that, you know, there’s a light and a dark side, you know, to the individual, and I appreciate that shade. Who in pop culture is doing something that you find inspiring today?

Brendan Cawley: Well, I’ll take to go to , I’ll go to kinda I thought about this a lot about why we went this way. Really, I went this way with the brand, and I think a lot of it is Allen Iverson. If you guys think about, you know, I was in high school in 2004. Iverson was this bad boy. I was a big basketball player and fan. I think everyone around Philadelphia was an Allen Iverson fan in those days. Underdog, small guy, going up against Giants, severely checkered past, tattoos all over him, cornrows, which today is the status quo. But back then, it was he caught a lot of flak for that. Right? I was absolutely obsessed with him. 

And to me, in hindsight, like, he is that righteous felon. He was a guy that came from nothing, got into a lot of trouble, you know, probably was profiled a bit and put into a box, but emerged from that, put the city on his back, went against Shaq and Kobe in the finals. Like, he is, I think, a huge inspiration to kind of the brand, but also just, like, where the world was at that time for kids, you know, for young men. I think, you know, Tony Soprano was there. The wires are The Wire. You know, Jay z, Biggie, you know, even like Phish who’s I’m a huge fan of Phish. They even had this, you know although they’re if you know them well, they’re playful and stuff, but, like, outsiders really think of them as, you know, like a, you know, a drug scene and things like that.

That paradox or oxymoron between, like, how I think almost any entity or any person is not a % good or a % bad, but is actual, you know, much more complex than that, I think is where the brand was inspired by and the people that inspired it. And there’s just probably 20 more I could name. 

Today, I’m a huge LeBron James fan, like, die hard. And people that know me are, you know, don’t like that. They’re freaked out by it. My, our cat, my wife got a kitten, without my approval two years ago. And the trade off was I got to name it, and so this little girl kitten that we have is named Lebron. 

And I think that, you know, that guy is just an inspiration from also fits into the the paradigm, I think, of Righteous Stone. He was, you know, put on a pedestal very young and then from the time he was in high school scrutinized, you know, supposed to be the best player ever, but constantly and never endingly scrutinized and challenged, and it’s gone on forever. And, you know, even this week is kind of the pinnacle of it with what’s going on with him and Stephen a Smith.

And this guy has done nothing but, you know, he married his high school sweetheart. He’s the best dad in the world. He donates millions of dollars a year to these educational funds in Ohio. He makes these incredible movies that promote, like, good messages for kids. He brought all his friends along with him, you know, like Maff Carter, these other guys from his high school, like those are his tight circle. They’re done. They’ve done incredible, incredible business things.

And the most incredible thing is, he just continued to play basketball and work and be committed to the game, through two decades now. The guy’s still a top three guy in the NBA, maybe Top 1, and he’s 40 years old. And, you know, I saw him play at the Palestra when I was 17. He was a year above me. And just to the idea that he’s still playing today, still catching so much hate from so many people, but just continues to stay in his lane, do good things, and put up numbers. He’s a big inspiration and, you know, to me, just as a not as a, you know, business person, but just as a man. And, like, what’s good? You know, how do you handle yourself? How do you help people that need help? And, just try to, you know, just be a good person and ignore some of the distractions that come along the way.

Erik Gudmundson: I’m from Northeastern Ohio. And even though he hasn’t played in Cleveland in a long time, he basically is a saint there. He is considered royalty. No doubt. So I agree with what you’re saying.

Liam Dempsey: Brendan, as we understand that the recipe that you created in sixth grade is really still in use today. It’s a core recipe for your products, maybe with a few tweaks here and there. So is it,  is there a direct line there? Is it, at the general recipe that all your products use? Or is it, it’s on this product but not on that product? Talk us through that a little bit.

Brendan Cawley: Sure. So, yeah, the original recipe is very, very similar to what we use today. The main changes are there were some things early on that we would use, like, say, Worcestershire sauce, which I’m sure I don’t think anyone can actually pronounce that word right. You know, and that has you know, that’s really key key flavor profile to add to the marinade, I think, not just with jerky, but with a lot of, you know, meat, you know, steaks and things like that. 

But it contains these things. You know, the main thing it contains is, sardine, contains sardines. That’s one of, like, the key flavors on, like, Lee and Perrin’s Worcestershire. And a fish allergen is something you can’t really have going through commercial factories.

And I discovered that, you know, probably in, like, 2014-’15 where we were already making the jerky for a year or two, but then discovered, you know, our factory said, hey. Does this new USDA regulation or this SQF. We’re trying to get these allergens out of our factory. 

And we just, you know, started trying to reverse engineer it at home with what the, you know, what we think the core essence of the flavor is. And it’s, honestly, we were able to get it back to molasses, vinegar, a little bit of cinnamon, clove is key, and salt. And basically got it to the point where we’re just mixing things up at home and have a side by side of, like, Lee and Perron’s versus our homemade Worcestershire that doesn’t contain sardines. And got it to a point where it was virtually undetectable from us, just in a jar versus, you know, what we bought at the store. And then bam, you know, how do we scale that up into the, you know, the 500 pound 500-pound batches, and it worked.

And not only was that like a fish allergen thing, but across the recipe, you start to look at like things that you buy at the store, like a retail formula. And then you’re like, well, what’s the key? There’s so much overlap, like salt, vinegar, water, there’s always so much overlap, and like from different sauces. So then you’re just like, well, how do we pull that out? Get the water out of there. Just get the cool ingredients that are driving the flavor. Get that, keep that in the recipe, and then just add back water, vinegar, etc., to get back to the holistic recipe.

Erik Gudmundson: Talk about ingredients and changing ingredients around, but preserving the flavor. I’m looking at your logo right now, and it says righteous felon craft jerky. Would you ever consider doing a vegan jerky?

Brendan Cawley: We have for sure. There was a point in time, you know, it’s weird. It’s weird because I still feel like a newcomer in the space. And I sometimes forget that I’ve been now doing this for twelve years. But now am just starting to see some of the trends that we’ve gone through or cycles we’ve gone through over the last decade. 

And, like, I remember being at the Expo East trade show, like, five years ago. It’s a big trade show in our industry for natural foods. And we were there promoting our beef jerky. It’s like 2019, maybe ’18. And we were almost, like, meant to, we were, like, shamed by people, and as well as they were just confused that we were, like, they’re pushing beef jerky because at that point, it was like possible Burgers, Beyond Meat. Everyone was all they the country was so infatuated with non-meat or fake mea or vegan stuff.

And I remember being like, this is so bizarre. Like, this person’s mad at us because they just took a sample and they thought it was they assumed it to be vegan. And adapt and the roundabout way again to your thing is like, there was a point in time where that stuff was so popular that we felt we had to explore that just to satisfy wherever the market was headed. But as you guys may or may not know, like the whole market has completely collapsed. Those firms have gone bankrupt. You know, Beyond Meat did a beef jerky with Pepsi that, you know, went out to, like, 250,000 stores. And within a month, almost all of it was returned. It never took off. It was such a huge fad that just exploded and then dropped. 

And I’m happy that we never went too far down the path of exploring it. The things we have done and explored but never launched would be like a mango jerky. We’ve done some cool experiments locally with mushroom jerky, like, you know, doing dehydrate dehydrating marinating shiitakes. And they’re great. They taste good. 

And, you know, unfortunately, five or ten years ago, I would launch almost anything that tastes good. Today, because of how much how many people we have that work here and how this is the livelihood of so many people. And when we launch something, the fact that we have to be able to supply that and have it sell through at least 5,000 retailers to be kind of just to kind of cover the development costs. 

And it’s always these things athat are always gonna steal from another existing SKU or flavor we have on the store, right? They’re a brand, a store is never just gonna give you endless space. It’s like, Hey, look, we’ll put your shiitake mushroom in, or we’ll put your Sole Survivor jerky in, but which one are we taking off? And then that becomes a real business decision of, again, that’s, you know, all the people that work here and the goals that we have as a company, you don’t wanna rock the boat of something that’s working really well. And that’s, you know, I think how the business has evolved a bit. 

And I much I like both parts, but I really used to love just the R&D process and doing cool stuff with other cool brands. Like, you know, we did the victory thing. We did a partnership with Baby Blues Barbecue down in Philadelphia, Baby Blues Jerky. We did that with Voodoo chili hot sauces, which was an awesome Jimi Hendrix kind of themed bowl bag, which I love, which we’ve discontinued since, just from a space, you know, just from you. We can’t do everything forever. 

So, we’ve done one with St. Louis for spice out of Philadelphia. It was called our Halo Diablo jerky. Those are the super fun things that unfortunately, get harder to do as you grow, because it just becomes difficult to do small batch stuff at a large scale.

Erik Gudmundson: Oh, your company’s doing something right. I don’t think it’s going away anytime soon, which is fantastic news for my taste buds. As you continue as you continue to grow, are you hiring right now? And, if so, where can folks learn about the available positions that you have?

Brendan Cawley: Oh, great timing. Yes. We are hiring. Our website has a careers link on it. We are currently hiring warehouse personnel. We are hiring a social media manager. We are hiring an ops, an ops leader, to help manage those different production sites that I mentioned and all the logistics that go into getting the raw materials and ingredients and packaging, you know, coordinated through all those sites. We are looking for a sales vice president. You know, a leader of the sales team here. So, we have a ton of growth ahead and we are hiring more so now than we ever have. So I’m glad you brought that up.

Liam Dempsey: Yeah. We’ll be sure to link to your careers page over on the show notes page on [startlocal.co]. Brendan, I’m gonna ask you what’s becoming a more challenging question for our guests.

Brendan Cawley: Sure.

Liam Dempsey: Tell us about a business or nonprofit in Chester County that more folks should know about.

Brendan Cawley: Alright. I got two good ones. 

I think the Natural Lands, they call themselves is it the Natural Lands and the, they’re over there on, Route 1 in Chatsford. But they’re kinda linked with the museum over there, the art museum. I forget the name. But, anyways, the Natural Lands group, I think is awesome. You know, my wife and I and my parents, you know, we all use, you know, Stroud Preserve, Chester Preserve. You know, there’s a handful other ones in this area. I just think that’s those places are so cool for just hikes or walks on the weekend or at night. That group essentially works to preserve and find more of those opportunities to protect hundreds of acres at a time or I guess in Chester, I think it’s 1310. 

And I think that’s super important in Chester County because otherwise, you guys have probably seen it. I mean, a farm there’s any land that’s not protected will become townhomes, will become, you know, a Toll Brothers neighborhood. And I’m not saying that’s the worst thing. You know, I think it’s a great town, and we wanna welcome more people here. And, you know, the more people that are around here, families raised, and the school districts, continue to be good. I think that’s overall good for society and the local economy.

But there’s something special about Chester County, particularly along the Brandywine River, that we want to protect kind of how that land looks today versus how it looked five hundred years ago. And so that’s when I think people don’t need to necessarily donate to, but you definitely try to get out and spend some time at those parks because they’re awesome, particularly as the weather is getting nicer here.

Erik Gudmundson: Friday night lights at Cheslin is coming up, very soon. So check it out. What was the second organization you had in mind?

Brendan Cawley: Well, real quick on porsche, just to go back, was, there’s another one that people should know about that I don’t think it’s a lot of credits from, like, where I grew up, and it’s down on Bonnesville Road. And it’s an old World War 2 textile factory that they’ve converted now into a walking park. And I was just there last weekend. And that would be, I don’t know who actually runs that or like how you support it, but it’s in East Brandywine and that place is awesome. Really, really cool spot.

I think the Main Street organization is another one that we’ve supported. We, you know, we were the headline sponsor last year for the jam, summer jam down at Kerr Park. I thought that was an awesome event.

I think Downingtown has done an awesome job over the last ten or fifteen years in trans you know, create making the downtown center a destination more so than it used to be, but I still think there’s a lot to go to make it a true you know, a place where people just wanna come park, hang out for eight hours, and make a day of it.

And so that organization, I think, does that, and they’re all very passionate. Bill Kovaleski, you know, founder of Victory is a big part of that. And I didn’t get to mention him earlier, but he’s been an awesome mentor and friend to me through the years. 

And, but, yeah, that I think those two organizations are two that come to mind that everyone can benefit from even it’s not donating to them. It’s just utilizing what they’ve created to have a great day or have a great, you know, hike.

Erik Gudmundson: How can the community here support Righteous Felon?

Brendan Cawley: I think the community has already been such an incredible, man, community has been awesome to us here. Like, so many friends, family, old schoolmates of mine have been nothing but supportive, through the years. I think that’s a huge key to our success, which is why I’m happy to, you know, remain here, grow the business here.

And, yeah, I’d essentially ask, don’t change. Just, we appreciate how everyone supported the brand and cut us some slack through the years, if you know, as we’ve grown, I’m sure there’ve been stumbles we’ve made. But, you know, by and large, I think Westchester, Downingtown, Chester County have all been big proponents of Righteous Fellon, you know, wear a lot of the t-shirts and the hats and the swag and buy it out in the stores when they see it. 

I think people don’t realize how helpful it is just when you, when they buy the product at a store. Like, stores are easy to get into. They’re hard to stay in. Like, you every store has a velocity metric, which is like, hey, if this product if we’re not moving three or four or five of these a week, like, it’s just, you know, underutilized real estate on our shelves. So when people, you know, just support by buying a bag because they like it, that means the world to us. 

Rocking the gear means the world to us. Even taking pictures when they see it at a store, because otherwise, you know, we actually have employees that we send out just to check on stores. So you can imagine between labor, gas, you know, how much we invest in making sure store execution is happening. If someone just if we get 10 photos in a week from friends that are just like, saw this at Croppers or saw this at at Giant, and we’re immediately like, oh, shit. They’re missing our top two skews. We call that store up. We’re like, hey. It looks like you need a, you know, it looks like you need a replenishment on OG Hickory and Habanero or something. That is, goes a long way for us. So, I think the community is already doing more than I could ever hope for, and I hope it continues.

Erik Gudmundson: Brandon Cawley, CEO of Righteous Felon, and thank you for coming on the Start Local podcast today. Where can listeners connect with you, learn more about your delicious snacks, and maybe even buy a few today?

Brendan Cawley: I think, for me, my Instagram is El Jefe, which is what the team calls me here, at least in our fictitious, jerky, underground world. That’s my nickname. 

Righteous Felon on Instagram. And as far as getting the product, you know, our website’s a great spot. Amazon Prime is a great spot if ecommerce is most convenient. But otherwise, it’s, you know, Crops Market, Kimberton Whole Foods, Leoni’s, all the beer distributors in this area, Costco, Giant, Wawa, you know, It’s in a lot of spots around here in the Chester County area, and you can always stop by our warehouse as well. We sell bags, and we sell products right here out of the warehouse, which is amazing.

Liam Dempsey: Brendan, thanks so much for joining us today. I just wanna second your shout out to Bill Kovaleski. He’s been a kind friend to this show as well. So we’re he does such good work in the community. So delighted to hear his name spoken with such reverence and respect.

Brendan Cawley: He’s an absolute legend. And I think he’s who connected us initially.

Liam Dempsey: He did. He did. 

Brendan Cawley: He did? He’s the best.

Erik Gudmundson: Well, thank you also to my cohost, Liam Dempsey. I’m Erik Gudmundson. 

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